12 ms·

'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi

139 points by dan1234 14y ago

sharkweek 14y ago
>Putting these tools front and centre is designed to inspire tinkering. I just got my first pi a few days ago -- I have had so much fun with it already. I'm working on a list of a variety of things I can do with it, as it has really sparked my creativity. I'll probably end up ordering several more for various tinkering. The possibilities are endless as to what these cheap but powerful devices will allow the creative minds to come up with; very exciting!
- mhurron 14y ago
  I'm getting one for a monitoring dashboard. It's unfortunate that it doesn't have a VGA or DVI port (for me preferably VGA) and only has video output over HDMI. It would seem that if you were creating a cheap computer to be used to tinker and learn it would support video output that would be used to connect it to inexpensive computer monitors. Thankfully adapters aren't that expensive.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Most (all?) TVs being sold today support HDMI, so I think the thought is that children don't have to buy a monitor too and can just plug these into their parents TV.
    - mhurron 14y ago
      Maybe it's just me but it seems to me that it would be more likely that someone would get their hands on an inexpensive used monitor to tinker with instead of using the family TV. An inexpensive monitor would also allow you to set up basically anywhere in the house. I know when I was growing up I would not have been able to tinker using the TV for very long before someone else in the family would want to use the TV.
      - jff 14y ago
        There may be an old TV in the garage which can take input from the on-board composite video output. Otherwise, it'll be $10 at Goodwill.
        mark-r 14y ago
        I don't think Goodwill even takes them anymore, they just end up paying to send them to the dump in the end. Their value has actually gone negative.
        unimpressive 14y ago
        Garage sales. Those will have old TV's for the rest of the decade at least.
      - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
        People still watched TV when you were growing up.
    - blhack 14y ago
      +1 -- one of the biggest hurdles I had when I got my pi was actually connecting to the thing. I don't have a TV, and neither do any of my friends. Eventually I just brought it in to work and plugged it into one of the TVs we use for information display for our customers. -- Since then, though, I've started work on this: http://raspihacker.com http://raspihacker.com The aim of this is to address some of the problems that I encountered with my raspi.
      - n3rdy 14y ago
        The popular pi distros usually support SSH by default. Another solution would be software that finds the pi on your network. You could just use an ip scanner, but a specialized one could filter out any other devices that happen to be running an ssh server or listening on an ssh port.
        blhack 14y ago
        The second thing you just listed is exactly what my remix does.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      This is true. I've been buying $87 21" 1080p monitors with HDMI. That's pretty cost effective for a dashboard.
      - mark-r 14y ago
        Would love to know where you're finding those - the cheapest at Newegg is $120.
        ChuckMcM 14y ago
        They are noname imports. They are also 12mS TFT, LED backlight HDMI only. The OSC has 'contrast', 'brightness', and 'game', 'movie', 'computer' color settings. They look like these : http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/333299683/color_television_21_inch_color_tv.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/333299683/color_television...
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      HDMI connector is also a darn sight smaller, which is good for limited board space, and probably cheaper than a D-SUB connector as well. (Remember, they were pretty tightly squeezed on budget)
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    HDMI and DVI-D are essentially the same minus audio, so assuming your monitor supports DVI-D and not just DVI-A, you can buy an HDMI->DVI cable from monoprice for less than 5 bucks. Converting to VGA is pricier because of the D->A conversion required.
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      You may even have a spare adapter buried in your closet like I did. More and more graphics cards are coming with HDMI -> DVI-D adapters, you see.
  - gbog 14y ago
    I know a guy in the industry, the Pi has been the object of very lengthy discussions about its connectors already, I don't think they forgot the VGA port.
- hyperbovine 14y ago
  I have encountered huge bugs with USB in the Pi for things as diverse as wifi streaming, network HDD sharing, bluetooth, webcam snapshots, and microphone access. I keep reading these rave reviews about the Pi and wondering: is it just me or is this thing practically worthless for anything outside of AV playback (for which it admittedly works well, at least for hardware-accelerated codecs)? What are you doing with your Pi that makes you so happy?
  - dalke 14y ago
    The article commented about USB bugs but goes on to say that most have been fixed.
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
This is pretty much an advertisement and the article hardly has any original content. What is this article doing on HN? Raspberry Pi is a well funded start up and the false modesty is really transparent.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  A startup.... charity organization? I mean, I suppose that could technically be considered a thing, but I don't think it is really in the spirit of most startups considered in HN. It's not like they are a profit driven enterprise.
  - johansch 14y ago
    Perhaps sort of like Mozilla are masquerading as a charity?
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I see absolutely no evidence that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is unsavory in any way.
- mayneack 14y ago
  Yeah, they totally knew what they were doing. Hence the smooth scaling up to filling the demand for 100,000 on the first day. I remember my personal smooth shopping experience.
  - mje__ 14y ago
    Sarcasm? I bought on the first day, and it took 8 weeks for my order to be shipped; friends who ordered later waited 17(!) weeks for their pi
    - krzyk 14y ago
      Yeah, I wonder how much customers they lost because of the supply problems. I was very existed on the day it started selling (or DDOS those two sites), wanted to buy two. But I wasn't able to, so I waited few weeks until I could place an order, but my interest faded with time, and as of now (almost year after they started selling it) I still don't own zero respberrypis.
leoc 14y ago
Two million dollars to design an open-source GPU on Kickstarter? Seems like an obviously great idea, assuming that the people behind it are competent enough GPU design, and that a mere $2m is actually enough. And that the project wouldn't be patent-litigated into the ground, of course.
- neolefty 14y ago
  He said 2M from each of the people who complained ...
  - leoc 14y ago
    I don't think that was was what he meant; what he said ("I want $2m from all the people who've criticised me") certainly doesn't have to be interpreted that way.
- bradfa 14y ago
  $2 million isn't enough to design a reasonable performing GPU that can be sold at low cost. Just the salaries for the engineering staff and prototype builds will cost in excess of that. A more realistic goal would be to get $2 million in a Kickstarter and pay a bunch of engineers to reverse engineer the drivers needed to drive an existing high quality SoC GPU. That way we can use existing silicon but have open source drivers. Open source graphics drivers are something that's very hard to find in the ARM SoC world today.
leoc 14y ago
Interesting glimpse of the nuances of the Broadcom/Raspberry Pi Foundation relationship.
sown 14y ago
Hi, I'd love to start making systems like Raspberry Pi. How does one start designing entire system boards like this? I know digital circuits and simple DC circuits. What else do I need to know? I've heard of Eagle before but I don't know to do board layout. Is there a resource for a kernel engineer to go off and get started designing hardware?
- jff 14y ago
  The hardest part is probably going to be power. A lot of the rest is just wiring up a bunch of components, which is complicated but not electronics-heavy. Datasheets are your friend. My first suggestion is to get a microcontroller like a PIC and design a circuit board for something simple. Something like the SpiffChorder (http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/hardware http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/hardware), which acts as a USB chording keyboard with about a dozen components, might be a good start. Eagle is free for small boards. The biggest hurdle here is probably getting your boards made--it'll be expensive and slow compared to everything else you're doing.
  - johansch 14y ago
    Power hard - how? It gets regulated 5V via Micro USB.
    - jff 14y ago
      I forgot about that part, I was thinking back to my experiences at a hardware startup. The battery circuitry was only a small portion of the board, but it was the most complicated electrically.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Yeah, in the simplest case you can battery power a pi with one of those rechargable battery-pack usb chargers meant for cellphones. Those require absolutely zero technical skill, start around $20, and it looks like they can power a pi from a few hours to more than 10.
    - tcas 14y ago
djhworld 14y ago
I bought a Pi for unknown reasons initially. It's currently serving as a cheap VPN server now though and is handy for running scripts that need to be on all the time. Perfect little "server" for £25, can't beat it really.
- graue 14y ago
  I bought one for a NAS. Funny thing about the Pi as a server is, it's less powerful than every client that will ever connect to it.
  - takluyver 14y ago
    That's not that new for servers - home NAS boxes don't need much computing power, routers & printers are often HTTP servers to allow configuration, and there are those plug computers that presumably get used as servers.
    - graue 14y ago
      Yeah. It's funny in my case, though. I'm writing a music streaming web app and not sure yet if the RPi will be able to transcode formats in real-time, so have pondered using decoders in JavaScript, e.g. [1], instead. Normally this would be an obvious task to do on the server side. [1]: https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Does it bother anyone else that anyone who thought they would "only sell 1,000" had to be exceptionally dense? A blindness to the marketability of a $35 linux computer stuns me, whoever that person is keep them them the hell away from the strategy sessions :-) When they announced it I, and every single 'senior' engineer I talked to said exactly the same thing, "If they can pull this off they will sell millions of these." Granted the engineers designing the Pi were in diapers when the Apple II came out but a bit of history will show you that if you get a 10x jump in price/performance on anything the impact is large and profound. You can use it as an iron clad variation of the mouse trap quote "If you can build a mouse trap that is either 10x more effective, or 10x cheaper than the current solution, you will capture a significant portion of the mousetrap market." 1,000 ? Really? Did they even think about the Commodor VIC20 which was a crap machine but met the mousetrap rule and sold several million units? I'm glad they've pulled it off, I've got 15 Raspberry Pi boards (5 of the 256M ones and 10 of the 512M ones) I have every reason to believe I can build any of a number of products out of them that would sell in the range of 10,000 a month. So they were just clueless. Now they know. The next step will be more interesting. Looking for another ARM manufacturer to take the bet, whether its Samsung or TI or maybe Applied Micro. Will be interesting to see.
- bobbles 14y ago
  Perhaps they contracted the estimators for the Nexus 4 to help with their supply predictions
- Tyrant505 14y ago
  I disagree with you because it is confusing times for such a niche. This is a hobbyist product in a time where Radio Shack sells cell phones now. Due to globalization and recent hacker upswing, it was a great success, NOT something to be easily predicted in a strategy session. Go back to your meeting, :).
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    FWIW the exact same reasoning was used with the Personal Computer which was "Gee its not like non-engineers really need a computer so there really isn't much of a market for one." Seriously, that is what folks believed. And the folks making machines out of Z80's, 8080's, and 6800's really cleaned up for a while. If you've noticed, we're making fewer and fewer general purpose computers (the trendy call it the 'post pc era') and once again the learning curve is steep and intimidating. Look how many Arduinos sold for $35, now you offer the same thing but it runs Linux at the same price point? So at the very least they should have guesstimated that they could sell as many there were Arduino's sold. That would have gotten them to > 1M.
doctoboggan 14y ago
I ordered a raspi and made an android controlled toy car. Now my company has ordered 6 and we will be giving them away at PyCon this year. Gauging by how badly I wanted one before they came out I could have told you they'd sell significantly more than 10,000
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
My son and I want to start getting into robotics (probably starting with mindstorm). I'd like to encourage him into programming. Is there a way I can put the two of these together? Alternatively, if you had these interests/goals as requirements, how would you solve them?
- numbsafari 14y ago
  If you are more robotics oriented, start here: http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.arduino.cc/ and skip the Pi.
  - gbog 14y ago
    why? you assume that they have a computer already.
    - numbsafari 14y ago
      Um... he did post to HN... so... yeah, I guess maybe he could be doing that from the public library.
- reacocard 14y ago
  At least back when I was doing mindstorms stuff (pre-NXT), there were a number of projects that would let you compile alternative languages into mindstorms bytecode, therby giving you a rather more capable environment than LEGO's. I used NQC[1], some quick googling suggests it's been succeeded by NXC[2] for the newer NXT mindstorms stuff. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a good idea to jump right into a language like this though - even LEGO's normal graphical mindstorms environment will still serve to teach basic programming skills, and it's probably more approachable for a novice. [1] - http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/ http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/ [2] - http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/ http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/
VolatileVoid 14y ago
Perhaps this isn't the best place for this question, but I know that this is a community of hackers and I can't think of a better audience for it. I've been eyeing a Raspberry Pi board for some time, but I can't think of what I'd like to do with it. I have NO background in EE - I'm really just a programmer. But I think it would be cool to, say, somehow make a raspberry pi turn my house lights on and off remotely (or via some timer). Now I know that there's the GPIO port on the Pi, but... how do I use it? How do I wire it up? I think that's my biggest challenge. I have lots of old electronics, and potential uses for the Raspberry Pi, but I haven't the faintest clue about how to wire it all together. Perhaps I'm way out of my element, but I don't even know where to get started. I'd love to see very, very simple Rapsberry Pi hacks using the GPIO ports to interface with existing electronics, so I can get some ideas and so I can learn. I guess what I'm saying is: I think the Raspberry Pi is really cool for hardware hacks, but I've not got the faintest clue about where to start - only that I want to start somewhere! Does anyone have any ideas?
- coob 14y ago
  Hi - to wire up the RPi's GPIO to a mains power switch, you need a relay board to toggle a high voltage switch. See this project: http://www.progetti-hw-sw.it/raspberry.htm http://www.progetti-hw-sw.it/raspberry.htm
- akavel 14y ago
  http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub tries to collect many links about RPi, with eye on beginners coming from different worlds. It really has plenty of highly valuable information; maybe not exactly easiest to navigate, but tries hard, and succeeding here is probably not an easy task to achieve in the end. [edit] In simpler words: if googling doesn't help me, that's the second place I try to search (and sometimes even the first, especially if I already know the thing I need is there).

139 points by dan1234 14y ago

>Putting these tools front and centre is designed to inspire tinkering. I just got my first pi a few days ago -- I have had so much fun with it already. I'm working on a list of a variety of things I can do with it, as it has really sparked my creativity. I'll probably end up ordering several more for various tinkering. The possibilities are endless as to what these cheap but powerful devices will allow the creative minds to come up with; very exciting!

mhurron 14y ago
I'm getting one for a monitoring dashboard. It's unfortunate that it doesn't have a VGA or DVI port (for me preferably VGA) and only has video output over HDMI. It would seem that if you were creating a cheap computer to be used to tinker and learn it would support video output that would be used to connect it to inexpensive computer monitors. Thankfully adapters aren't that expensive.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Most (all?) TVs being sold today support HDMI, so I think the thought is that children don't have to buy a monitor too and can just plug these into their parents TV.
  - mhurron 14y ago
    Maybe it's just me but it seems to me that it would be more likely that someone would get their hands on an inexpensive used monitor to tinker with instead of using the family TV. An inexpensive monitor would also allow you to set up basically anywhere in the house. I know when I was growing up I would not have been able to tinker using the TV for very long before someone else in the family would want to use the TV.
    - jff 14y ago
      There may be an old TV in the garage which can take input from the on-board composite video output. Otherwise, it'll be $10 at Goodwill.
      - mark-r 14y ago
        I don't think Goodwill even takes them anymore, they just end up paying to send them to the dump in the end. Their value has actually gone negative.
        unimpressive 14y ago
        Garage sales. Those will have old TV's for the rest of the decade at least.
    - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
      People still watched TV when you were growing up.
  - blhack 14y ago
    +1 -- one of the biggest hurdles I had when I got my pi was actually connecting to the thing. I don't have a TV, and neither do any of my friends. Eventually I just brought it in to work and plugged it into one of the TVs we use for information display for our customers. -- Since then, though, I've started work on this: http://raspihacker.com http://raspihacker.com The aim of this is to address some of the problems that I encountered with my raspi.
    - n3rdy 14y ago
      The popular pi distros usually support SSH by default. Another solution would be software that finds the pi on your network. You could just use an ip scanner, but a specialized one could filter out any other devices that happen to be running an ssh server or listening on an ssh port.
      - blhack 14y ago
        The second thing you just listed is exactly what my remix does.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    This is true. I've been buying $87 21" 1080p monitors with HDMI. That's pretty cost effective for a dashboard.
    - mark-r 14y ago
      Would love to know where you're finding those - the cheapest at Newegg is $120.
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        They are noname imports. They are also 12mS TFT, LED backlight HDMI only. The OSC has 'contrast', 'brightness', and 'game', 'movie', 'computer' color settings. They look like these : http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/333299683/color_television_21_inch_color_tv.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/333299683/color_television...
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    HDMI connector is also a darn sight smaller, which is good for limited board space, and probably cheaper than a D-SUB connector as well. (Remember, they were pretty tightly squeezed on budget)
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  HDMI and DVI-D are essentially the same minus audio, so assuming your monitor supports DVI-D and not just DVI-A, you can buy an HDMI->DVI cable from monoprice for less than 5 bucks. Converting to VGA is pricier because of the D->A conversion required.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    You may even have a spare adapter buried in your closet like I did. More and more graphics cards are coming with HDMI -> DVI-D adapters, you see.
- gbog 14y ago
  I know a guy in the industry, the Pi has been the object of very lengthy discussions about its connectors already, I don't think they forgot the VGA port.
hyperbovine 14y ago
I have encountered huge bugs with USB in the Pi for things as diverse as wifi streaming, network HDD sharing, bluetooth, webcam snapshots, and microphone access. I keep reading these rave reviews about the Pi and wondering: is it just me or is this thing practically worthless for anything outside of AV playback (for which it admittedly works well, at least for hardware-accelerated codecs)? What are you doing with your Pi that makes you so happy?
- dalke 14y ago
  The article commented about USB bugs but goes on to say that most have been fixed.

IheartApplesDix 14y ago

This is pretty much an advertisement and the article hardly has any original content. What is this article doing on HN? Raspberry Pi is a well funded start up and the false modesty is really transparent.

jlgreco 14y ago
A startup.... charity organization? I mean, I suppose that could technically be considered a thing, but I don't think it is really in the spirit of most startups considered in HN. It's not like they are a profit driven enterprise.
- johansch 14y ago
  Perhaps sort of like Mozilla are masquerading as a charity?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I see absolutely no evidence that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is unsavory in any way.
mayneack 14y ago
Yeah, they totally knew what they were doing. Hence the smooth scaling up to filling the demand for 100,000 on the first day. I remember my personal smooth shopping experience.
- mje__ 14y ago
  Sarcasm? I bought on the first day, and it took 8 weeks for my order to be shipped; friends who ordered later waited 17(!) weeks for their pi
  - krzyk 14y ago
    Yeah, I wonder how much customers they lost because of the supply problems. I was very existed on the day it started selling (or DDOS those two sites), wanted to buy two. But I wasn't able to, so I waited few weeks until I could place an order, but my interest faded with time, and as of now (almost year after they started selling it) I still don't own zero respberrypis.

leoc 14y ago

Two million dollars to design an open-source GPU on Kickstarter? Seems like an obviously great idea, assuming that the people behind it are competent enough GPU design, and that a mere $2m is actually enough. And that the project wouldn't be patent-litigated into the ground, of course.

neolefty 14y ago
He said 2M from each of the people who complained ...
- leoc 14y ago
  I don't think that was was what he meant; what he said ("I want $2m from all the people who've criticised me") certainly doesn't have to be interpreted that way.
bradfa 14y ago
$2 million isn't enough to design a reasonable performing GPU that can be sold at low cost. Just the salaries for the engineering staff and prototype builds will cost in excess of that. A more realistic goal would be to get $2 million in a Kickstarter and pay a bunch of engineers to reverse engineer the drivers needed to drive an existing high quality SoC GPU. That way we can use existing silicon but have open source drivers. Open source graphics drivers are something that's very hard to find in the ARM SoC world today.

leoc 14y ago

Interesting glimpse of the nuances of the Broadcom/Raspberry Pi Foundation relationship.

sown 14y ago

Hi, I'd love to start making systems like Raspberry Pi. How does one start designing entire system boards like this? I know digital circuits and simple DC circuits. What else do I need to know? I've heard of Eagle before but I don't know to do board layout. Is there a resource for a kernel engineer to go off and get started designing hardware?

jff 14y ago
The hardest part is probably going to be power. A lot of the rest is just wiring up a bunch of components, which is complicated but not electronics-heavy. Datasheets are your friend. My first suggestion is to get a microcontroller like a PIC and design a circuit board for something simple. Something like the SpiffChorder (http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/hardware http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/hardware), which acts as a USB chording keyboard with about a dozen components, might be a good start. Eagle is free for small boards. The biggest hurdle here is probably getting your boards made--it'll be expensive and slow compared to everything else you're doing.
- johansch 14y ago
  Power hard - how? It gets regulated 5V via Micro USB.
  - jff 14y ago
    I forgot about that part, I was thinking back to my experiences at a hardware startup. The battery circuitry was only a small portion of the board, but it was the most complicated electrically.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Yeah, in the simplest case you can battery power a pi with one of those rechargable battery-pack usb chargers meant for cellphones. Those require absolutely zero technical skill, start around $20, and it looks like they can power a pi from a few hours to more than 10.
  - tcas 14y ago

djhworld 14y ago

I bought a Pi for unknown reasons initially. It's currently serving as a cheap VPN server now though and is handy for running scripts that need to be on all the time. Perfect little "server" for £25, can't beat it really.

graue 14y ago
I bought one for a NAS. Funny thing about the Pi as a server is, it's less powerful than every client that will ever connect to it.
- takluyver 14y ago
  That's not that new for servers - home NAS boxes don't need much computing power, routers & printers are often HTTP servers to allow configuration, and there are those plug computers that presumably get used as servers.
  - graue 14y ago
    Yeah. It's funny in my case, though. I'm writing a music streaming web app and not sure yet if the RPi will be able to transcode formats in real-time, so have pondered using decoders in JavaScript, e.g. [1], instead. Normally this would be an obvious task to do on the server side. [1]: https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Does it bother anyone else that anyone who thought they would "only sell 1,000" had to be exceptionally dense? A blindness to the marketability of a $35 linux computer stuns me, whoever that person is keep them them the hell away from the strategy sessions :-) When they announced it I, and every single 'senior' engineer I talked to said exactly the same thing, "If they can pull this off they will sell millions of these." Granted the engineers designing the Pi were in diapers when the Apple II came out but a bit of history will show you that if you get a 10x jump in price/performance on anything the impact is large and profound. You can use it as an iron clad variation of the mouse trap quote "If you can build a mouse trap that is either 10x more effective, or 10x cheaper than the current solution, you will capture a significant portion of the mousetrap market." 1,000 ? Really? Did they even think about the Commodor VIC20 which was a crap machine but met the mousetrap rule and sold several million units? I'm glad they've pulled it off, I've got 15 Raspberry Pi boards (5 of the 256M ones and 10 of the 512M ones) I have every reason to believe I can build any of a number of products out of them that would sell in the range of 10,000 a month. So they were just clueless. Now they know. The next step will be more interesting. Looking for another ARM manufacturer to take the bet, whether its Samsung or TI or maybe Applied Micro. Will be interesting to see.

bobbles 14y ago
Perhaps they contracted the estimators for the Nexus 4 to help with their supply predictions
Tyrant505 14y ago
I disagree with you because it is confusing times for such a niche. This is a hobbyist product in a time where Radio Shack sells cell phones now. Due to globalization and recent hacker upswing, it was a great success, NOT something to be easily predicted in a strategy session. Go back to your meeting, :).
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  FWIW the exact same reasoning was used with the Personal Computer which was "Gee its not like non-engineers really need a computer so there really isn't much of a market for one." Seriously, that is what folks believed. And the folks making machines out of Z80's, 8080's, and 6800's really cleaned up for a while. If you've noticed, we're making fewer and fewer general purpose computers (the trendy call it the 'post pc era') and once again the learning curve is steep and intimidating. Look how many Arduinos sold for $35, now you offer the same thing but it runs Linux at the same price point? So at the very least they should have guesstimated that they could sell as many there were Arduino's sold. That would have gotten them to > 1M.

doctoboggan 14y ago

I ordered a raspi and made an android controlled toy car. Now my company has ordered 6 and we will be giving them away at PyCon this year. Gauging by how badly I wanted one before they came out I could have told you they'd sell significantly more than 10,000

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

My son and I want to start getting into robotics (probably starting with mindstorm). I'd like to encourage him into programming. Is there a way I can put the two of these together? Alternatively, if you had these interests/goals as requirements, how would you solve them?

numbsafari 14y ago
If you are more robotics oriented, start here: http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.arduino.cc/ and skip the Pi.
- gbog 14y ago
  why? you assume that they have a computer already.
  - numbsafari 14y ago
    Um... he did post to HN... so... yeah, I guess maybe he could be doing that from the public library.
reacocard 14y ago
At least back when I was doing mindstorms stuff (pre-NXT), there were a number of projects that would let you compile alternative languages into mindstorms bytecode, therby giving you a rather more capable environment than LEGO's. I used NQC[1], some quick googling suggests it's been succeeded by NXC[2] for the newer NXT mindstorms stuff. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a good idea to jump right into a language like this though - even LEGO's normal graphical mindstorms environment will still serve to teach basic programming skills, and it's probably more approachable for a novice. [1] - http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/ http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/ [2] - http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/ http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/

VolatileVoid 14y ago

Perhaps this isn't the best place for this question, but I know that this is a community of hackers and I can't think of a better audience for it. I've been eyeing a Raspberry Pi board for some time, but I can't think of what I'd like to do with it. I have NO background in EE - I'm really just a programmer. But I think it would be cool to, say, somehow make a raspberry pi turn my house lights on and off remotely (or via some timer). Now I know that there's the GPIO port on the Pi, but... how do I use it? How do I wire it up? I think that's my biggest challenge. I have lots of old electronics, and potential uses for the Raspberry Pi, but I haven't the faintest clue about how to wire it all together. Perhaps I'm way out of my element, but I don't even know where to get started. I'd love to see very, very simple Rapsberry Pi hacks using the GPIO ports to interface with existing electronics, so I can get some ideas and so I can learn. I guess what I'm saying is: I think the Raspberry Pi is really cool for hardware hacks, but I've not got the faintest clue about where to start - only that I want to start somewhere! Does anyone have any ideas?

coob 14y ago
Hi - to wire up the RPi's GPIO to a mains power switch, you need a relay board to toggle a high voltage switch. See this project: http://www.progetti-hw-sw.it/raspberry.htm http://www.progetti-hw-sw.it/raspberry.htm
akavel 14y ago
http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub tries to collect many links about RPi, with eye on beginners coming from different worlds. It really has plenty of highly valuable information; maybe not exactly easiest to navigate, but tries hard, and succeeding here is probably not an easy task to achieve in the end. [edit] In simpler words: if googling doesn't help me, that's the second place I try to search (and sometimes even the first, especially if I already know the thing I need is there).